Tony Banks, Baron Stratford

Among Banks's ministerial responsibilities were listed buildings, and he approved controversial additions including the 1930s Three Magpies pub in Birmingham and numerous redundant NHS buildings.

He was also responsible for Grade I listing the Severn Bridge.

He also controversially approved the demolition of the Twin Towers as part of the redevelopment of Wembley Stadium, dismissively referring to them as "concrete blocks".

Anthony Louis Banks, Baron Stratford (8 April 1942 – 8 January 2006) was a British politician who served as Minister for Sport from 1997 to 1999.

From 1964 to 1967 he studied politics at the University of York, where he was President of the Student Representative Council.

In 1964 Banks unsuccessfully stood for the Liberal Party in the first elections for the London Borough Councils that began operation in 1965.

He later joined the Labour Party.

He graduated with an upper-second degree in 1967, then undertook further study at the London School of Economics.

Banks then became a trade union official, first for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, from 1969 to 1975, then as Assistant General Secretary of the Association of Broadcasting Staff, from 1976 to 1983 (it later merged with other unions to form the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union or BECTU).

For several years Banks was responsible for freelancers.

Having unsuccessfully contested East Grinstead in 1970, Newcastle upon Tyne North in October 1974 (by 469 votes), and Watford in 1979, Banks won Newham North West for Labour in 1983, defeating his predecessor, Arthur Lewis, who had been deselected as Labour's candidate.

He was a member of Lambeth Council from 1971 to 1974, and during the 1970s and 1980s he was a prominent member of the Greater London Council (GLC), representing Hammersmith (1970–1977) and Tooting (1981–1986).

A member of the Labour Party, he was a member of Parliament from 1983 to 2005 and subsequently as a member of the House of Lords.

He was well known in the House of Commons for his acid tongue.

Banks was born at the Jubilee Maternity Hospital, Belfast, the only son and elder child of Albert Herbert Banks, a sergeant in the Royal Army Service Corps who before the Second World War had been a toolmaker, and his wife, Olive Irene (Rene), née Rusca.

The family returned to England after the birth, and he grew up in Brixton and Tooting.

He was educated at St John's School, Brixton, and Tenison's School, Kennington.

He failed his "O" Levels and left school to work as a clerk for a few years, but studied at night school to gain the qualifications necessary for university.

He was Chairman of the Greater London Council from 1985 until its abolition in 1986.

In 1990, responding to a speech by the Conservative MP Terry Dicks opposing government funding for the arts, Banks said that Dicks was "living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can get elected to Parliament".

Banks also described another Conservative MP, Nicholas Soames, as "a one-man food mountain".

Banks referred to Canadians as "dickheads" for culling seals.

During a question on Basildon's maternity services in 1994, Banks remarked that then Conservative MP for the area, David Amess had (as the father of five children) "put far too much pressure on Basildon's maternity services and suggested he use "a do-it-yourself vasectomy kit with two bricks."

Following a boundary review in 1995, Newham North West was expanded and renamed West Ham for the general election in 1997.

After Labour's election victory in 1997 Banks was appointed Minister for Sport in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

He called for foreign players in the English Premiership to become eligible to play for England: "Can you imagine seeing Cantona and Giggs swapping the Red of Manchester for the White of England?"

However his calling for one UK football team in 1997 was met with ridicule from supporters and one colleague, the Scottish Labour MP Sam Galbraith, stated that the creation of such a team would only happen "over his dead body".

Banks also offended Scotland's supporters by describing the team as the "West Ham of world football - they never quite perform to their potential"

At the Labour Party conference in 1997 Banks described William Hague, then Leader of the Conservative Party, as a "foetus", adding that Conservative MPs might be rethinking their views on abortion.

His only speeches regarding the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan involved requests for government money and the help of the Royal Navy for the animals of the Kabul Zoo, particularly for Marjan, an elderly lion that needed air-conditioning for its rheumatism.

He was regarded as on the left of Labour, being a republican, an opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.

On 21 May 2004 Banks proposed an Early Day Motion in response to newspaper reports that MI5 had proposed using pigeons as flying bombs during the Second World War.

The motion condemned the proposal, described human beings as "obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal", and proposed that the House "looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the Earth and wipes them out, thus giving nature the opportunity to start again".

Banks was also a supporter of the arts and chaired the House of Commons Works of Art Committee, which had responsibility for historic paintings and sculptures in the Palace of Westminster.

Banks retained the seat until 2005, when he stood down.

From then until his retirement from the Commons in 2005 Banks remained a backbencher, though he made a failed bid to become Labour's candidate in the election for Mayor of London in 2004.

Banks was a vegetarian, a supporter of animal rights and a Vice-President of the League Against Cruel Sports.

After two years in office he stepped down to become the Prime Minister's envoy for England's bid to host the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

The bid failed and Germany won instead.

He also suggested that the football teams of the four constituent parts of the UK should merge to compete in the Olympic Games, as eventually occurred in 2012.